Memory usage
 

so i am having a huge memory usage issue with nui... the memory usage has been jumping from 11mb to 45mb and causing the game to do short freezes. does this about 4-5 times every time it trys to dump the amount of memory usage its using then slowly builds back up. wasn't have this issue prior versions but the 5.01.00 lite has just been causing the game to lag. i really enjoy this user interface and hope the problem can be resolved soon. kinda hard to play the game now without nui running. :D

Can you try renaming your WTF folder to WTF.saved and then logging back into WoW and let me know if the problem persists?

I've been noticing this for a long time, several months at least, but I thought it was just the way nUI worked (and it's never hindered my game play).

Edit: Logged in to see what the numbers were exactly. Seems to start out (with or without other addons installed/clean WTF folder) at roughly 11mb and then slowly climbs up to 16mb before starting over again. It's a repetitive cycle. This happens on my new system pretty much the same as it did on my old system. Using a different OS as well.

To some extent, that's true.

nUI does a *lot* of work, especially when you're in combat in a raid... this produces garbage which causes the total memory usage to slowly climb until the garbage collector fires at which time the memory usage will drop back down to reflect what nUI currently has in use.

This was never an issue until the WoW 3.0 patch when, for some reason, that garbage collection process (a normal part of the Lua engine that I have *no* control over) started causing hiccups in the game. Bliz changed something in 3.0 which is causing this problem and it is, quite frankly, a bug.

The key to understanding this is that it affects all mods and even affects the game with NO mods installed at all. There are thousands and thousands of posts on the WoW forums about this problem. It's also worth noting that the severity of the problem is closely tied to your system's abilities, speed, available memory, etc.

Unfortunately, there's very little I can do about it. I do keep working to try and reduce how much garbage nUI creates in order to reduce the impact of this bug, but that's about all I can do.

I haven't taken the time to track it yet, but it would be interesting to see if there's any improvement in this problem on the PTR.

Just checked on the PTR. It's still doing it but it's not climbing all the way up to 16mb. It's goes to about 13 and then restarts.

Not too sure that it has much to do with your system though. I had the same numbers on my old system as I do on my new one.

Old specs:
1.8ghz dual core
2mb of ram
8800 GT 512mb
500w PSU
Win XP SP3

New specs:
3ghz dual core
4mb of ram
4870 1gb GDDR5
650w PSU
Started on Win XP, beta tester for Win 7, and now toying with Vista SP2.

There really are two different things here... one is the AMOUNT of memory being used which, technically, shouldn't matter but since WoW 3.0 has mattered (once you get to about 100meg you're pretty much toast now), the other is the PERFORMANCE of the memory and that's the one that's tied to your system's capabilities.

On some people's systems, when the garbage collector fires their system just craters... some people are experiences 2-3 second freezes in the game (not nUI users, just people in general in the WoW forums). For other people, they never even notice the issue.

To be sure, however, since WoW 3.0 a big piece of the puzzle is how much memory your addons are using. 100 meg appears to be the barrier and the closer you get to it, the more impact the garbage collection problem seems to have.

You're fighting dirty..... willyoustopthat!

No fair making sense in your post ;)

I'm sorry... I'll try to resist that temptation in the future.

*ashamed of himself*

I 5 box on one machine with the Pro version and I have not observed the garbage slowdown. Q6600 with 8gb system ram. I have more issues waiting for questhelper to update the slaves.

BTW having the UI in the exact same position on each account when I PIP (screen swap) is invaluable. This alone has saved me hours of UI setup and file copying.

Thanks a ton.